Death Penalty

by William J. Coughlin

  “You objected, I take it?”

  “Oh yeah, but it became more of a lynching than a trial.”

  “If the case comes before my father, will he disqualify himself?”

  “Because he knows me? No. Your father knows most of the lawyers in this state, . . . Dean Palmer.”

  The little smile returned. “You may call me Cat, if you like. But not in front of my students.”

  “You got them properly terrified, I presume?”

  “Terror? No. But a bit of firmness never hurt, Charley, especially since a number of students here are around my own age, or older. The job requires some respect. I can’t afford to be a Rodney Dangerfield around this place.”

  “Can I buy you a coffee? I presume they still have a machine in the student lounge.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll take a rain check. I have a million things to do. I’m teaching criminal law, in addition to my other duties. Our criminal law man walked off the first week of the semester.”

  “Your dad’s old course. He was my professor.”

  “You taught it, too. I remember that.”

  “Long ago. That time when your father was sick.”

  “Did you like doing it?”

  “Teaching? Not very much, frankly. How about you?”

  She nodded. “I do, a lot.” She looked at her watch. “Well, I do have to go. It’s been nice seeing you again, Charley.”

  “When you get home, remember me to your father.”

  “I don’t live at home. But I get invited out on the boat from time to time. I’ll pass along your hello.”

  She turned and walked away. It was pleasant to watch. She wasn’t a pudgy little girl anymore.

  When I returned to the library, the students behind the desk seemed to view me with new respect. I wondered if Cat Palmer, the quiet little girl I remembered, might have grown up and become a tyrant. If so, she was the best-looking tyrant I had ever seen.

  Her father, Judge Frank Palmer, had been my criminal law professor. He had taken an interest in me, even arranging for a clerkship with a judge who was a friend of his. And later, when disbarment seemed certain for me, he had quietly stepped in and helped save my license. I had been suspended for a year, but without his behind-the-scenes help, I would have had my license jerked forever.

  He had done so much for me, it seemed unworthy and ungrateful that I was now having lustful thoughts about his daughter. Natural, maybe, but ungrateful nonetheless.

  I went back to the library and began my reading on the latest product liability cases. I read, but my mind really wasn’t on it.

  RECOVERING ALCOHOLICS GET lonesome just like everyone else, only sometimes it seems even worse for us. Until you stop you don’t realize how much of modern social life is built around drinking.

  For some, bars and saloons become second homes, a substitute for the rich man’s private club, a place to see friends, kill time, laugh a little. Even a brief visit to relatives or friends calls for a beer or something alcoholic as a form of greeting. Beer at the ballpark, a flask at the football game, it’s almost universal, a liquid bond that cheers the head and warms the heart, a tribal rite.

  Nothing wrong with that, as long as you can handle it.

  For people like myself, those who can’t handle it, the world becomes a rather closed-in place when you give it up. So you learn to compensate. You hang around with people like yourself, friends you’ve made at AA meetings, people who won’t insist that you drink with them, people who share the common problem. Instead of bars you find new places to gather. Now with Marylou gone, the loneliness seemed more acute.

  One of my regular stops had been Goldman’s Marina, a small place on the river just a mile up from my office in Pickeral Point.

  Herb Goldman is one of those people who doesn’t look rich but is. But his marina was different. It looked run-down and was. Herb believed no wood was old until it splintered underfoot. Walking out on any of his boat docks was an adventure, sometimes a dangerous adventure. He provided moorings for nearly a hundred boats, none over thirty feet. The place smelled of gasoline, boat oil, and the river. To boat people, those pungent fumes were far more fragrant than the rarest perfume.

  Herb also reeked of gas and boat oil. His worn work clothes, stained with the ghosts of a thousand dabs of oil and hull paint, hung on him like gray rags. Herb, who was fifty, looked much older. His hair, what remained, was a white grizzle around his ears and the back of his head, and looked more like an early frost. Herb’s skin was the texture of alligator and burned black by fifty summer suns. His dark features, a wide flared nose, and deep-set eyes, were almost simian. He had a set of bottom teeth but seldom wore them, using them just to eat. He now kept the teeth in his shirt pocket. He used to keep them in his back trouser pocket, but one day he skidded on a slippery dock, fell, and in effect bit himself. Thereafter he parked them in his shirt. His large hands were gnarled and the color of engine oil. He stared out at the world through murky yellow eyes, eyes permanently squinted and suspicious.

  Unless you knew better, Herb looked like a boat bum, the kind of guy who hung around the yards and performed whatever jobs other people didn’t want to do.

  But he was rich and sitting on even more.

  Hungry developers eyed his run-down marina, riverfront land, seeing it as a gold mine for condos, and worth perhaps a million or two. Herb didn’t need the money. He was a magician of motors and the court of last resort for anything that sucked gas and floated. Boaters sometimes flew him to their yachts overseas just so he could make a diagnosis. They paid for his services through their golden noses.

  Herb had managed to hold on to most of the money he had amassed over the years. And that made him a most unusual ex-drunk. Most of us, myself included, had done quite the opposite.

  I drove my Chrysler into Herb’s cinder-covered parking lot. People sometimes complained it was rough on their tires, but when they did, Herb merely suggested they move their boat and business to some other place. Few did.

  The Chrysler was new and I was conscious of the ripping sound below as I slowly rolled over the rough cinders. I had tried to talk Herb into at least paving the place with cheap asphalt. But no asphalt was cheap enough.

  I went looking for him.

  It was just the beginning of May, so most of the boats were still out of the water. A few people were working on their hulls. I looked for Herb in the big storage hangar but found only a huge cruiser riding in the deep well, its motor coverings off, but no Herb. He wasn’t in his littered office either, so I went out to the nearly empty docks.

  Herb was standing at the end of a very short dock. His oily deck shoes toed the end that now consisted of scorched and splintered wood.

  “Hey, Herb. What happened?”

  He turned, looking more mournful than ever. “Drunks,” he said, as if that explained everything. He stepped by me, returning to the shore.

  “I was going to call you, as a matter of fact,” he said. “It happened only a couple of hours ago.”

  “What happened?”

  He ignored the question. I followed him up to his office. Inside he extracted a can of soda from a battered cooler.

  “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  He grabbed another and flipped it to me.

  He took a long drink from the can, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “They came in here just before noon.”

  “Who did?”

  “The drunks. A man and a woman. They come in an old thirty-three-foot Wexler. You know the boat?”

  “No.”

  “God, but that Wexler outfit could make boats. They been out of business for twenty years now. But, until then, they were the best. They refused to convert to fiberglass and that was the end of them. This boat was a Wexler, thirty-three feet, handmade, all gorgeous wood. Some of them Wexlers are worth a fortune now. This one wasn’t well kept, you could see that right off. Goddamned sin to have a boat like that and not
keep it up.”

  He took another long drag at the can. “Anyway, they come in and tied up. I thought they wanted gas, so I go out there to tell them to pull over to the gas dock. They were looking for a bar, that’s all. I guess they thought we’d have one here. I told them the nearest was O’Hara’s down the road. They walked there. Staggered might be a better word.”

  He sighed. “They were gone a couple of hours. I was working in the shed, but I happened to see them come back. Hear them would be more accurate. The two of them were going at each other, with some choice words that even I hadn’t heard before.

  “I thought there might be trouble so I came out. They cursed all the way to their boat, then got on.”

  He shook his head. “Jesus, Charley, I heard the asshole hit the engine without using the blower first. I didn’t even get a chance to shout a warning. The damn thing blew up like the Fourth of July. Those old boats, they have a way of building up those gasoline fumes. It was a goddamn good thing the dock there was empty or they would have blown up everything within fifty feet.”

  “Were they killed?” I asked.

  Herb shook his head. “No way. God looks after drunks, otherwise you and I wouldn’t even be here, would we?”

  He finished the can, then, like a member of the Pistons, shot it into a far wastebasket. “The woman ended up about fifty feet out in the river. He landed in the water between two docks. They both looked like toasted marshmallows, although the doctors tell me the burns aren’t serious. The fucking boat no longer exists, just toothpicks mostly.”

  Herb sighed. “They were talking about suing me as the ambulance was taking them away.” He looked at me with those cloudy yellow eyes. “Can they?”

  “Anybody who has the filing fee can sue anyone else,” I said. “The question is, can they collect?”

  “Can they?”

  “Anybody besides you see him start the motor without hitting the blower?”

  He nodded. “Old Snodgrass. That guy is here more than I am. He sands that hull of his so much it’s paper thin. It’s his hobby. I think he really hates having to put the boat in the water. He just likes working on it. He says he saw it, same as me.”

  “You didn’t give them gas, or service them in any way?”

  “Just let them tie up.”

  “Did you think they were so drunk they couldn’t handle a boat?”

  “No. They had been drinking, that was obvious. But they seemed okay as far as running a car or a boat. At least, they did to me.”

  “How about the people up at O’Hara’s?”

  “I called them. They say they looked all right. Of course, they would anyway. They don’t want to get sued either. Why?”

  “The only way they can collect is to show you had some kind of duty toward them and neglected it, or you did something you shouldn’t have, something that caused the explosion.”

  “He caused the explosion. Even a baboon knows enough to run the blower and disperse the gas fumes before hitting the ignition.”

  “Then, if everything is as you say, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Do you think I’d lie?”

  “Hey, we all color things to put a good light on ourselves. I do, Herb. You do. Lawyers know that, so we take everything with a grain of salt.”

  “No wonder everybody hates you fuckers.”

  “Yeah. But everybody loves us when they need us.”

  “This guy is really pissed off. I think he’ll end up suing, even if he can’t win. You ever own a boat, Charley?”

  I smiled. “I owned a lot of things before I drank them away. A Rolls, even my own airplane. But never a boat. Why?”

  “It’s different. It becomes like a religion with some people, the center of their lives. Like dope, I suppose.”

  “Or like booze?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, like that. They can’t think of anything else. I think the Wexler, even if he didn’t take good care of it, might have been like that to this guy. His whole damn world blew up on him. It doesn’t matter that it was his fault or that he was lucky to come out of it with a few hairs burned off, or that his wife will look like a walnut for a couple of weeks. The beautiful handcrafted Wexler is gone. He’s going to raise some hell.”

  “Let him. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “We’ll see. Women, boats, no matter what, if you love something enough it makes you crazy.”

  I finished my soda and flipped the can. Only I missed. I walked over and stuffed it into the wastebasket.

  “You going?”

  “I’ve got things to do.”

  “Okay. You owe me sixty-five cents for the pop.”

  “Nice of you. What about my legal advice?”

  “Hey, I can get that free in any bar in town. There’s always a drunken lawyer or two around who wants to show off. On the other hand, the soda pop has value.”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  He grinned, showing the missing teeth. “What the hell, I’m a softy. We’ll call it even.”

  I left. It wasn’t the first sixty-five-cent fee I had earned. Sometimes my advice went for even less.

  Out in the boatyard I detected the faint odor of burnt wood, an aftereffect of the explosion. It mixed in well with all the other aromas.

  I saw a man working with a sander on a hull of an old boat that sat on wooden supports. I presumed he was Snodgrass. I waved, but his concentration was total and he didn’t see me.

  He was making a kind of love with that sander, not sexual, nothing like that, more the kind of love that Michelangelo might have put into that famous ceiling. Every brushstroke a caress.

  I wondered what Snodgrass would do for the object of his love. From the look of satisfied rapture, probably anything.

  For some reason, I felt more lonely than before.

  BACK AT MY APARTMENT the little red light on my answering machine was blinking. Each blink in the series represented a recorded call and message. Any voice, even a recorded one, was welcome in my present mood.

  I filled a Manhattan glass with ice and diet ginger ale. It looked like the real thing and I sipped it as if it were. Then I sat down by the phone and pushed the button to summon the genie of the tape.

  The first call was my insurance man reminding me that a premium would be due in a few days and asking me to come in to reconstruct my insurance package. Fat chance. He had already talked me into more coverage than I could ever need.

  The second call was from Mrs. Emily Proder. Mrs. Proder had stipped in the local supermarket and fractured her wrist. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in her seventy years. I was suing the store on her behalf, and I had carefully explained it might be months, perhaps years before we got a settlement or judgment. That had been a week ago. She called every day. If she missed me at the office she called my apartment. She was one of the reasons I was considering getting an unlisted number again. A hungry lawyer looks for every advantage to bring in business, a listed phone is one. A successful attorney always makes sure his home number is unlisted. I was slowly becoming successful again, so I was rethinking the telephone situation.

  The third recorded message was different.

  “Mr. Sloan, my name is Rebecca Harris. You know me, I think. I’m a waitress at the Pickeral Point Inn. I go by the name of Becky there.” She had paused. Her voice sounded strained, not an uncommon thing for people who need to call lawyers after business hours.

  “I need to see you,” she continued. She gave the phone number. I jotted it down on the pad I kept by the phone.

  All the waitresses at the inn tended to look alike. Harry Sims, the manager who did the hiring there, liked older blondes, women who had once been beauties and who, while still pretty, had the tested look of old cars, worn some but carefully maintained. The attitude of the inn’s waitresses, apparently by policy, was friendly but not familiar, at least that was the attitude I saw on the rare occasions I went there to eat.

  I tried to conjure up a Becky.
<
br />   I thought I knew which one she was. If I was correct, Becky was a tall woman who, while trim, had a sturdy look to her, the kind for whom toting a heavy tray isn’t much of a chore. The one I was thinking of seemed tough and wore her blond hair pulled back into a stylish ponytail.

  Like most ex-drunks I have a soft spot for waitresses. For most of us, they, along with bartenders, constituted the major social contact of our lives, a kind of extended family. Waitresses dealt with all kinds of people, good and bad, and seemed, generally, to be tolerant of drunks. Which was a nice quality if you happened to be a drunk.

  I dialed the number. It rang several times and then I heard a blip and a recorded message. It was the same voice, but the prerecorded tone was untroubled and rather bouncy.

  The little bleep sounded and I spoke. “This is Charley Sloan, Ms. Harris. If you’re unable to get back to me tonight, I’ll be at my office tomorrow morning. You can reach me there. Thank you.”

  I hung up.

  I smiled. Just have your machine call my machine and set up an appointment. It was a wonderful age in which to be alive.

  I sipped my drink and pretended.

  3

  Mrs. Fenton, my secretary, was at the office when I arrived. Every morning at nine o’clock precisely she appeared. I always got the impression when I arrived later that she felt I was late, even though I was the boss. She never said anything. The disapproval was in her expression.

  “I made an appointment for you. A Rebecca Harris. She’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  “Did she say what her trouble is?”

  Mrs. Fenton frowned. “I never ask. You know that.”

  “Sometimes they volunteer things.”

  “She didn’t.”

  Much to my annoyance, Mrs. Fenton had once again straightened up my desk. Everything was in perfect square piles. The problem was I didn’t know what was in which pile. I had spoken to her and politely asked her to curb her neatness compulsion, at least as far as my desk was concerned, but it did no good.

  I fished out a yellow pad so I would have something to make notes on when Rebecca Harris arrived.

  Big corporations, when they have legal problems, seek out the big law firms that specialize in big firms and big bucks. People come to a lawyer like me when the old man has blackened their eye and they want out of marriage, or when the bills are choking them to death and they’re thinking about bankruptcy. Some have been injured in an accident, some fired by a boss they consider biased or unfair. Some want to make a will or attack one made by a dead relative. There are as many reasons as human beings. Many, if not most, of the people who come looking for me do so because some cop or prosecutor has voiced the suspicion they have done something the law considers bad, bad enough to spend some time in prison. Fear, anger, or greed, and sometimes a mix of all three, are the root reasons people come to a lawyer like me.